Navigating identity as a controversial issue: One teacher’s disclosure for critical empathic reasoning

ABSTRACT

This case study aims to expand our understanding of controversial issues teaching and teacher disclosure by illustrating how one “out” gay/queer high school teacher approaches and experiences disclosure with the National Day of Silence (DoS), a yearly event focused on increasing awareness of LGBTQ voices and concerns in schools. Using interviews and document analysis, the study asks how planning and participating in the DoS impacted teacher thinking about disclosure with respect to controversial identity-related instruction. Findings show that while teaching this personally-implicated issue, the teacher did not practice strict impartiality but offered significant democratic learning opportunities consistent with mutual respect and student autonomy. His case offers an ethical alternative for teachers with socio-politically marginalized identities implicated in open controversial issues: a model I term disclosure for critical empathic reasoning. The model’s four attributes and its implications for controversial issues teaching, teacher education, and administrative support are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Civic education
• controversial issues
• queer theory
• social studies
• teacher disclosure
• teacher identities

Acknowledgments

Talbot made this learning possible; I am deeply grateful for his honesty, openness, and courageous example. Sooz Stahl, Brian Tauzel, Jane Lo, Walter C. Parker, J. B. Mayo Jr., and Sarah Shear each offered important support and encouragement at different points in the research or writing process.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The dangers and difficulties of educators being out in classrooms are abundantly documented: see, e.g. (Benson, Smith, & Flanagan, 2014; Connell, 2012; Endo, Reece-Miller, & Santavicca, 2010; Martino & Cumming-Potvin, 2017; Mayo, 2004; McKenna-Buchanan et al., 2015). Currently, workers in 28 states in the U.S. can be fired for being LGBTQ (Non-Discrimination Laws, 2018). Only 72 nations offer any legal protections for LGBTQ employees, and elsewhere their identities are subject to lengthy prison sentences, corporal punishment, or death (Carroll & Mendos, 2017).

2. Talbot, my participant, self-identifies as gay or queer, and the National Day of Silence focuses on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Questioning (LGBTQ) identities. Otherwise, I use “queer” as an umbrella term. Queer references a history of power from the margins, the transformative reclamation of identity, and a deep well of grassroots activism that informs queer theory (Bassichis, Lee, & Spade, 2011). Queer can also be used to essentialize and manipulate the diversity under the queer umbrella, ignoring structural inequities, particularly around race: I use it with the hopefulness and call for intersectional analyses that Alexander (2017) so eloquently articulates.

3. Formerly the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, this education organization focuses on promoting safe schools for LGBTQ students, and now simply uses the acronym GLSEN (pronounced “glisten”).

4. Pseudonyms have been used for all potentially identifying information to protect participants’ identities.

5. Many GSAs use the more updated term Genders and Sexuality Alliance, but Douglass High used this name.

6. The district used the acronym LGBT rather than LGBTQ or other acronyms. With the district-level constraints that Talbot and this research faced, the omission of the term “queer” in the program title here is interesting because of the political meanings this choice avoids.

7. For more on the shared constructions of the day’s meanings and their implications for counter-socialization learning, see Conrad (2019).